have made a copy for the use of himself and his disciples; but it does not appear that he rejected any pieces which had been previously received, or admitted any which had not previously found a place in the collection. Further errors in the state 4 Having come to the above conclusions, it seems superfluous to make any further observations on the statements in the first paragraphments adduced in the first paragraph. If Confucius expurgated no previous Book, it is vain to try and specify the nature of his expurgation as Gow-yang Sew did.17 From Szema Ts'ëen we should suppose that there were no odes in the She later than the time of king Le, whereas there are 12 of the time of king Hwuy, 13 of that of king Seang, and 2 of the time of king Ting. Even the Sung of Loo which are referred to by the Suy writer and Choo He are not the latest pieces in the Book. The statement of the former that the odes were arranged in order and copied by Che, the music-master of Loo,18 rests on no authority but his own;-more than a thousand years after the supposed fact. I shall refer to it again, however, in the next chapter. 5 The question arises now of what Confucius really did for the Book of Poetry, if, indeed, he did anything at all. The only thing from which we can hazard the slightest opinion on the point we have from his own lips. In the Analects, IX. xiv., Did Confucius then) do anything for the Book of Poetry? he tells us:-'I returned from Wei to Loo, and then the music was reformed, and the pieces in the Ya and the Sung all found their proper places.' The return from Wei to Loo took place when the sage was in his 69th year, only five years before his death. He ceased from that time to take an active part in political affairs, and solaced himself with music, the study of the Classics, the writing of the Ch'un Ts'ëw, and familiar intercourse with those of his disciples who still kept about him. He reformed the music,-that to which the poems were sung; but wherein the reformation consisted we cannot tell. And he gave to the pieces of the Ya and the Sung their proper places. The present order of the Books in the Fung, slightly differing, we have seen, from that which was common in his boyhood, may also have now been determined by him. As to the arrangement of the odes in the other Parts of the Work, we cannot say of what extent it was. 17 Every instance pleaded by Sew in support of his expurgation of stanzas, lines, and characters has been disposed of by various scholars ;-particularly by Choo E-tsun, in the note just referred 18 When this Che lived is much disputed. From the references to him in Ana. VIII. xv., XVIII. ix., we naturally suppose him to have been a contemporary of Confucius. to. What are now called the correct Ya precede the pieces called the Ya of a changed character or of a degenerate age; but there is no chronological order in their following one another, and it will be seen, from the notes on the separate odes, that there are not a few of the latter class, which are illustrations of a good reign and of the observance of propriety as much as any of the former. In the Books of the Sung again, the occurrence of the Praise-songs of Loo between the sacrificial cdes of Chow and Shang is an anomaly for which we try in vain to discover a reasonable explanation. 6. While we cannot discover, therefore, any peculiar labours of Confucius on the Book of Poetry, and we have it now, as will be shown in the next section, substantially as he found it already compiled to his hand, the subsequent preservation of it may reasonably be attributed to the admiration which he expressed for it, and the enthusiasm for it with which he sought to inspire his disciples. Confucius' service to the She) was in the impulse which he gave to the study of it. It was one of the themes on which he delighted to converse with them.19 He taught that it is from the odes that the mind receives its best stimulus.20 A man ignorant of them was, in his opinion, like one who stands with his face towards a wall, limited in his views, and unable to advance.21 Of the two things which his son could specify as particularly enjoined on him by the sage, the first was that he should learn the odes.22 In this way Confucius, probably, contributed largely to the subsequent preservation of the Book of Poetry; the preservation of the tablets on which the odes were inscribed, and the preservation of it in the memories of all who venerated his authority, and looked up to him as their master. 19 Analects, VII. xvii. Ana. XVI. xiii. 20 Ana., VIII. viii., xvii. IX. 21 Aua., xvii. X. 22 SECTION. II. THE BOOK OF POETRY FROM THE TIME OF CONFUCIUS TILL THE GENERAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF THE PRESENT TEXT. 1. Of the attention paid to the study of the Book of Poetry from the death of Confucius to the rise of the Tsin dynasty, we have abundant evidence in the writings of his grand-son Tsze-sze, of From Confucius to Mencius, and of Seun K'ing. One of the acknow. the dynasty of Ts in. ledged distinctions of Mencius is his acquaintance with the odes, of which his canon for the study of them prefixed to my volumes is a proof; and Seun K'ing survived the extinction of the Chow dynasty, and lived on into the times of Ts'in.1 after the fires of T's'in. 2. The Poems shared in the calamity which all the other classical Works, excepting the Yih, suffered, when the tyrant of Ts'in issued his edict for their destruction. But I have shown, in the prolegomena to vol. I., that only a few years elapsed between the The Poems were all recovered) execution of his decree and the establishment of the Han dynasty, which distinguished itself by its labours to restore the monuments of ancient literature. The odes were all, or very nearly all, recovered;2 and the reason assigned for this is, that their preservation depended on the memory of scholars more than on their inscription upon tablets and silk. We shall find reason to accept this statement. 3 Three different texts of the odes made their appearance early Three different texts. in the Han dynasty, known as the She of Loo, of Ts'e, and of Han; that is, the Book of Poetry was recovered from three different quarters. [i] Lew Hin's catalogue of the Works in the imperial library of the earlier Han dynasty commences, on the She King, with a Collection of the three Texts in 28 chapters, which is followed by two Works of commentary on the Text of Loo.6 The former of The Text of Loo. them was by a Shin P'ei, of whom we have some account in the Literary Biographies of Han.8 He was a native of Loo, and had received his own knowledge of the odes from a scholar of Ts'e, called Fow Kew-pih.9 He was resorted to by many disci 1 Prolegomena to vol. II., p. 81. 2 In the last section reference was made to the number of the odes, given by Confucius himself as 300. He might mention the round number, not thinking it worth while to say that they were 305 or 311. The Classic now contains the text of 305 pieces, and the titles of other 6. It is contended by Choo and many other scholars, that in Confucius' time the text of those six was already lost, or rather that the titles were names of tunes only. More likely is the view that the text of the pieces was lost after Confucius' death. See in the body of this volume, pp. 267,268. 3凡三百五篇遭秦火而全者以 其諷誦不獨在竹帛故也;see Pan Koo's note appended to the catalogue of 4 Proleg. Vol. I. p. 5. 5詰經二十八卷魯齊 Lew Hin, Section 韓三家:-漢書三十藝文志 6 魯故二十五卷:魯說 = ·十八卷 申培 儒林傳第五十八漢書八十 9 浮丘伯 ples whom he taught to repeat the odes, but without entering into discussion with them on their interpretation. When the first emperor of the Han dynasty was passing through Loo, Shin followed him to the capital of that State, and had an interview with him. The emperor Woo, 10 in the beginning of his reign (B.c. 139), sent for him to court when he was more than 80 years old; and he appears to have survived a considerable number of years beyond that advanced age. The names of ten of his disciples are given, all men of eminence, and among them K'ung Gan-kwoh. A little later, the most noted adherent of the school of Loo was a Wei Heen, who arrived at the dignity of prime minister, and published the She of Loo in Stanzas and Lines.'11 Up and down in the Books of Han and Wei are to be found quotations of the odes, which must have been taken from the professors of the Loo recension; but neither the text nor the writings on it long survived. They are said to have perished during the Tsin dynasty (A.D. 265-419). When the catalogue of the Suy library was made, none of them were existing. [ii] The Han catalogue mentions five different works on the She of Tse.12 This text was from a Yuen Koo,13 a native of Ts'e, The Text of Tsc. about whom we learn, from the same chapter of Literary Biographies, that he was one of the Great scholars of the court in the time of the emperor King (B.c. 155–142), 14 a favourite with him, and specially distinguished for his knowledge of the odes and his advocacy of orthodox Confucian doctrine. He died in the next reign of Woo, more than 90 years old; and we are told that all the scholars of Ts'e who got a name in those days for their acquaintance with the She sprang from his school. Among his disciples was the well known name of Hea-how Ch'e-ch'ang, 15 who communicated his acquisitions to How Ts'ang, 16 a native of the present Shan-tung province, and author of two of the Works in the Han catalogue. How had three disciples of eminence,-Yih Fung, Seaou Wang che, and K'wang Hang.17 From them the Text of Ts'e was transmitted to others, whose names, with quotations from their writings, are scattered through the Books of Han. Neither 10 武帝 11 韋賢魯詩章句 12 齊后氏故二十卷; 齊孫氏故二十七卷齊后氏傳三十九卷;齊孫氏傳 十八卷:齊雜記十八卷 13 固 侯始昌: 16 匡衡 15 后蒼字近君東海郯人 17 翼奉蕭望之 text nor commentaries, however, had a better fate than the She of Loo. There is no mention of them in the catalogue of Suy. They are said to have perished even before the rise of the Tsin dynasty. [iii] The Text of Han was somewhat more fortunate. The Han catalogue contains the titles of four works, all by Han Ying, 18 whose The Text of Han Ying. surname is thus perpetuated in the text of the She which emanated from him. His biography follows that of How Ts'ang. He was a native, we are told, of the province of Yen, and a 'Great scholar' in the time of the emperor Wăn (B.c. 178-156),19 and on into the reigns of King and Woo. 'He laboured,' it is said, 'to unfold the meaning of the odes, and published an "Explanation of the Text," and "Illustrations of the She," containing several myriads of characters. His text was somewhat different from the texts of the She of Loo and Ts'e, but substantially of the same meaning." course Han founded a school; but while almost all the writings of his followers soon perished, both the Works just mentioned continued on through the various dynasties to the time of Sung. The Suy catalogue contains the titles of his text and two Works on it;20 the T'ang those of his text and his Illustrations;21 but when we come to the catalogue of Sung, published in the time of the Yuen. dynasty, we find only the Illustrations, in 10 Books or chapters; and Gow-yang Sew tells us that in his time this was all of Han that remained. It continues, entire or nearly so, to the present day, and later on in these prolegomena there will be found passages of it sufficient to give the reader a correct idea of its nature. 4. But while these three different recensions of the She all disappeared with the exception of a single fragment, their unhappy fate was owing not more to the convulsions by which the empire was often rent, and the consequent destruction of literary monuments, such as we have witnessed in our own day in China, than to the appearance of a fourth Text which displaced them by its superior A fourth Text; that of Maou. correctness, and the ability with which it was advocated and commented on. This was what is called the Text of Maou. It came into the field later than the others; but the Han catalogue contains the She of Maou in 29 chapters, and a commen 18 韓故 三十六卷;韓內傳四卷;韓外傳六卷᛬韓說 四十一卷 19 作內外傳數萬言其語頗與齊魯 殊然歸一也 20 韓詩二十二卷;韓詩翼要十卷;韓 詩外傳十卷 21 韓詩 詩二十卷;韓詩外傳十卷 |